Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

PRIMORDIAL DEBTS 61
abundantly clear just how wrong are conventional accounts of Europe
around this time "reverting to barter." Almost all of the Germanic law
codes use Roman money to make assessments; penalties for theft, for
instance, are almost always followed by demands that the thief not
only return the stolen property but pay any outstanding rent (or in the
event of stolen money, interest) owing for the amount of time it has
been in his possession. On the other hand, these were soon followed by
law codes by people living in territories that had never been under Roman
rule--in Ireland, Wales, Nordic countries, Russia-and these are
if anything even more revealing. They could be remarkably creative,
both in what could be used as a means of payment and on the precise
breakdown of injuries and insults that required compensation:
Compensation in the Welsh laws is reckoned primarily in cattle
and in the Irish ones in cattle or bondmaids (cumal), with
considerable use of precious metals in both. In the Germanic
codes it is mainly in precious metal . . . In the Russian codes it
was silver and furs, graduated from marten down to squirrel.
Their detail is remarkable, not only in the personal injuries
envisioned-specific compensations for the loss of an arm, a
hand, a forefinger, a nail, for a blow on the head so that the
brain is visible or bone projects-but in the coverage some of
them gave to the possessions of the individual household. Title
II of the Salic Law deals with the theft of pigs, Title III with
cattle, Title IV with sheep, Title V with goats, Title VI with
dogs, each time with an elaborate breakdown differentiating
between animals of different age and sex.44
This does make a great deal of psychological sense. I've already
remarked how difficult it is to imagine how a system of precise
equivalences-one young healthy milk cow is equivalent to exactly
thirty-six chickens-could arise from most forms of gift exchange. If
Henry gives Joshua a pig and feels he has received an inadequate
counter-gift, he might mock Joshua as a cheapskate, but he would have
little occasion to come up with a mathematical formula for precisely
how cheap he feels Joshua has been. On the other hand, if Joshua's
pig just destroyed Henry's garden, and especially, if that led to a fight
in which Henry lost a toe, and Henry's family is now hauling Joshua
up in front of the village assembly-this is precisely the context where
people are most likely to become petty and legalistic and express outrage
if they feel they have received one groat less than was their rightful
due. That means exact mathematical specificity: for instance, the